LOS ANGELES — Near the middle of
Oz the Great and Powerful, the title character (played by James Franco) surveys his
surreal surroundings and mutters, “Are you kidding me?”

On Friday, when the wizard and his hot-air balloon land in theaters, Disney hopes that ticket
buyers won’t think the same thing.

No movie studio would have the nerve to remake
The Wizard of Oz, the beloved 1939 musical ranked by the Library of Congress as the
most-watched film in history.

But
Oz the Great and Powerful, a Disney-produced prequel, is almost as intrepid. The company
is betting that a new twist on a story that moviegoers already love will yield a hit on a par with
Alice in Wonderland, which took in more than $1 billion in 2010.

It’s a breathtaking gamble.

Oz, at turns goofy and dark (and not a musical), cost about $325 million to make and
market, said people who worked on the movie and spoke anonymously. Franco has never anchored a
mainstream film before. Because of copyright constraints, Disney wasn’t able to reproduce certain
iconic imagery from
The Wizard of Oz, which was made by MGM but is now owned by Warner Bros. And audiences
have already rallied around a
Wizard of Oz prequel:
Wicked has been a Broadway hit for almost 10 years.

Disney’s marketers haven’t been cowed by the huge shadow cast by the original
Oz; indeed, the ads for the new film invite comparisons to the classic.

But the popularity of the original might ultimately represent the studio’s biggest
challenge.

Is there room for a new cinematic vision of Oz, as Disney thinks? Or will movie audiences (and
critics) be reluctant to embrace an Oz that doesn’t look a certain way, have a certain tone and
feature a certain set of slippers?

Such nostalgic properties are tricky. Some liberties can be taken and others can’t, producers
say — and the lines are blurry.

Sean Bailey, Disney’s president of movie production, said in an interview that he was “
cautiously optimistic” about the box-office prospects for
Oz the Great and Powerful, which is loosely based on the novels of L. Frank Baum.

Bailey and Alan F. Horn, Disney’s new studio chairman, are under pressure to deliver a hit.
John Carter, which opened a year ago, forced the company to take a $200 million write-down
— one of the largest in movie history.

The 2005 remake
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a cautionary example. What seemed a good idea on
paper — Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, with lots of digital imagery — was ultimately a disappointment,
with a fey Depp and his Oompa Loompas striking moviegoers as a tad creepy.